Adler flipped through various documents, asking Floyd Landis if he had signed and understood them; Landis had and did. He reviewed the 14-page deferred prosecution agreement, discussed details of the restitution plan, set bond terms, scheduled a status hearing for next year. Then Landis went downstairs for the formality of booking and fingerprinting. By lunchtime, he stepped into the sunshine outside San Diego’s federal courthouse and it was over.

But what if it wasn’t?

What if the shamed cyclist had not agreed to the government’s 36-month plan to repay donors he solicited to fund his legal defense following his positive drug test at the 2006 Tour de France – only to later admit he had been doping all along? What if he was indicted by a federal grand jury and took his case to trial?

What if, as Landis and others close to the case have hinted, he had included a 40-year-old man from Austin, Texas, on the witness list?

What if Lance Edward Armstrong had to raise his right hand and agree to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

We’ll never know, of course, and that’s too bad. You can’t blame Landis for taking the deal and avoiding the specter of federal prison. You also can’t blame the rest of us for wanting to know what really happened.

The night before Landis’ court appearance, Armstrong announced he wouldn’t fight charges by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, which promptly issued a lifetime ban and stripped him of his seven Tour de France titles. The president of the World Anti-Doping Agency called it tantamount to an admission of guilt; Armstrong spun it as refusing to oblige a kangaroo court motivated by vendetta.

Armstrong is probably right about this much: Most people probably have long since decided whether he won seven Tours with or without the aid of testosterone, human growth hormone, corticosteroids, EPO, saline and plasma infusions, illicit blood transfusions and who knows what else on the voluminous WADA banned list.

People look at the mountain of USADA evidence – the suspicious blood data, the dodgy 2001 test, the crooked doctors, the 10 former teammates willing to say he did it – and think royal flush. Or they look at the plastic yellow band on their wrist and nod: “The cancer card trumps all.”

But there’s another side to all this that we rarely hear about, rarely see. USADA references the “cover-up” in its charging letter to Armstrong, claiming the cyclist and his associates “engaged in activities to concede their conduct and mislead anti-doping authorities.” It alleges “the use of fear, intimidation and coercion to attempt to enforce a code of silence (or omerta) … to prevent the detection of the conspiracy.”

Former Armstrong teammate Tyler Hamilton writes about it in his new tell-all book, “The Secret Race,” while recounting his decision to testify about Armstrong’s doping before a Los Angeles grand jury, a case that was inexplicably dropped last February. Hamilton says as his day before the grand jury neared, his attorney received “a series of urgent calls from Lance’s lawyers, who were offering me their services, for free.”

“It was a classic Lance move," Hamilton continues. "For six years, he gives me zero support. Now, when things get tough, he wants us on the same team again. No thanks.”

Which brings us back to Landis and the Floyd Fairness Fund, and who was really behind it.

In the days after his positive test from the 2006 Tour de France, Landis has said he was confronted with divergent paths from the only other Americans to win cycling’s most prestigious race. Greg LeMond urged him to reveal the sport’s dark truths; Armstrong, his former teammate and now adversary, backed him as a clean cyclist and encouraged him to deny, deny, deny.

Landis took Armstrong’s advice. But did it end with advice?

Landis needed money to hire lawyers and PR experts, as Armstrong had done to fight the mounting attacks on his integrity. The Floyd Fairness Fund was born. A website was created with links for supporters to donate money. Landis wrote a book called, “Positively False.” He presided over a series of “town hall” meetings trumpeting his innocence.

In all, he raised an estimated $1 million. About $700,000, Landis and others from the FFF have said, came from big-ticket donors. At least four were investors in Tailwind Sports, including a reported $50,000 donation from founder and chairman Thomas Weisel.

Tailwind Sports owned the U.S. Postal Service and Discovery Channel professional cycling teams that Armstrong, who at one point had a 10-percent ownership stake, represented from 1998 to 2005. Landis raced for U.S. Postal Service before an acrimonious parting in 2004, when he left to become the lead rider for Phonak.

So why were the money guys behind Armstrong suddenly writing five-figure checks to a rival rider considered a traitor? Did Armstrong ask them, as some have suggested? Did he quietly pass them money to pass along to Landis? Did he magnanimously set aside past hostilities and help a fellow rider he genuinely believed was clean?

Or was something more sinister at work: Did it amount to hush money?

Three years later, Landis reversed course and took LeMond’s advice. He came clean about the sport’s underbelly and detailed his doping exploits, along with Armstrong’s.

That admission earned him a clear conscience – “I feel free,” Landis has told friends – but it also put him on the radar of the fraud division of the San Diego U.S. Attorney’s Office and further incurred Armstrong’s wrath. Landis had fully cooperated with law enforcement and anti-doping authorities, even wearing a wire in one investigation; now he faced a grand jury investigation for bilking donors to the Floyd Fairness Fund.

Landis ultimately, reluctantly brokered a deal to stay out of prison. It also meant he stayed out of court, and so, possibly, did a 40-year-old man with a yellow wristband.